July 11, 2007

Congratulations, Hooptygoo!

The haiku-loving Hooptygoo successfully identified the secret of the sillypost, with this haiku comment:
That is amazing!
You wrote the entire entry
Without using 'e'.

I didn't use the letter e in any of my comments on that post either, which forced me to use bizarre constructions like "third guy talk" instead of "third person voice". I left three hints, the most obvious one being the intentional misspelling of the name Hajera. Ironically, most people I know with that name spell it without the e, which is why I explicitly apologized for the typo in the comment itself.

So there you go. I'm sure very few of you care either way, but it's nice to see someone figure it out.

6 comments:

  1. and here I was thinking it was something complex and intellectual. boy was I wrong.

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  2. Maths hint was the clue,
    that sparked the idea in
    mind of Hooptygoo!

    :)

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  3. Clever. I remember reading that post and finding something odd about the flow of it but didn't realize that it was because you didn't use an 'e'.

    Good job, Hooptygoo. For some odd reason, you remind me of Polkaroo instead. :)

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  4. Wow, I'm behind... I haven't popped over here for a while... :S

    Hooptygoo is too smart... I'm jealous!

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  5. Hooptygoo not smart!
    Would not have solved the riddle
    without the last hint.

    Who would have guessed it?
    Maths A-level was not a
    complete waste of time!

    ;)

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  6. Asmaa: What did you expect? You're visiting a site called "Irrelevant Opinions". It's going to be irrelevant sometimes!

    Hooptygoo: Ah, the math clue. I wasn't sure how meaningful that would be to most people, but clearly you're familiar with natural logarithms. Kudos!

    Nauman: The flow was odd, I don't know why dropping the e made it sound pseudo-Shakespearean. Or C.S. Lewis style, apparently, as one reader put it. The tricky part is working without good past tense verbs, since I couldn't use the "-ed" suffix. So I had to use verbs like "sought" and "thought", and make excessive use of the gerund.

    AnonyMouse: Welcome back! This Hooptygoo really is a clever little critter, isn't it?

    Hooptygoo: Math is never a waste of time!

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